Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

by Gary Klein

The stressors disrupt our ability to use our working memory ...

The stressors distract our attention from th...

the data show that experienced decision makers adapt to time pressure very well by focusing on the most relevant cues and ignoring the others.

four sources of uncertainty:

Missing information. Information is unavailable. It has not been received or has been received but cannot be located when needed.

Unreliable information. The credibility of the source is low, or is perceived to be low even if the i...

Ambiguous or conflicting information. There is more than one reasonable way to in...

Complex information. It is difficult to integrate the different...

Analysis of historical data shows that the effective commanders, such as Grant and Rommel, accepted the inevitability of uncertainty. Rather than being paralyzed, their actions blocked by doubt, they all possessed the ability to shape the battlefield, acting decisively and prudently at the same time.

They were able to force the adversary on the defensive, shifting the burden of uncertainty. They were able to maintain flexibility without planning out various contingencies (which were sure to become obsolete).

On the battlefield, plans are vulnerable to the cascading probability of disruption. If a plan depends on six steps and each has a 90 percent probability of being carried out successfully, many decision makers will feel confident, whereas the actual probability of carrying out the plan is just over 50 percent since the probabilities multiply. Highly successful commanders seem to ...

Because uncertainty is inevitable, decisions can never be perfect. Often we believe that we can improve the decision by collecting more information, but in the process we lose opportunities. Skilled decision makers appear to know when to wait and when to act. Most important, they accept the need to act despite uncertainty.

we will not build up real expertise when:

The domain is dynamic. We have to predict human behavior. We have less chance for feedback. The task does not have enough repetition to build a sense of typicality. We have fewer trials.

The de minimus error may arise from using mental simulation to explain away cues that are early warnings of a problem. One exercise to correct this tendency is to use the crystal ball technique discussed in chapter 5. The idea is that you can look at the situation, pretend that a crystal ball has shown that your explanation is wrong, and try to come up with a different explanation.

The crystal ball method is not well suited for time-pressured conditions. By practicing with it when we have the time, we may learn what it feels like to fixate on a hypothesis. This judgment may help us in situations of time pressure.

A second application is to accept all errors as inevitable. In complex situations, no amount of effort is going to be able to prevent any errors.

Most poor decisions may result from having inadequate knowledge and expertise.

Experience does not translate directly into expertise if the domain is dynamic, feedback is inadequate, and the number and variety of experiences is too small.

Intuition (pattern recognition, having the big picture, achieving situation awareness)

Mental simulation (seeing the past and the future)

Using leverage points to solve ill-de...

Seeing the invisible (perceptual discriminations ...

Storyt...

Analogical and metaphorica...

Reading peoples’ minds (communica...

Rational a...

Team mind (drawing on the experience bas...

Judging the typicality of a situation Judging typical goals Recognizing typical courses of action Judging the solvability of a problem Detecting anomalies Judging the urgency of a problem Detecting opportunities Making fine discriminations Detecting gaps in a plan of action Detecting barriers that are responsible for gaps in a plan of action